Portugal para la Puente!

We have a puente the first week of December, which means we don't have classes on Mon or Tues, and everyone is going to be traveling. I will be gone for over 3 weeks traveling not too much later in December, so I wanted to stay close and not do anything too extravagant. WELL.....

Alan and I found flights from Madrid to Porto, Portugal for 5 (yes, you read that correctly and that was not a typo) euros! five! So we are flying to Porto on Thu Dec 3, and staying a night and day in Porto which is supposed to be a pretty riverside town with great free wine (well, port i guess?) tasting. Then we will train/bus down the coast to Lisbon where we have reservations for 2 nights in this cute hostel with a view of the ocean.

Yay year abroad travelingtodazzlingplacesallthetime!

:)

kicked butt my first day of teaching!

It went well! I am teaching two classes, two hours each, twice a week. My first class is 5 just-graduated nursing students, so early 20s. My second class is just two women, mid 20s.

I actually prepared a pretty good lesson plan for the short notice I had. I went in cold, without knowing how many students I'd have, their language level, etc. So I had to think on my feet a bit to figure out what would be good to start with. We ended up playing some fun games to get them talking in English a lot, I copied a short article out of a RyanAir in-flight magazine I had from when I went to London (the only English material I had in my room, haha) which we read through, found tons of new vocab words, summarized, etc. I also wrote an essay prompt resembling some SAT essay question, and gave them 20 minutes to answer, and I collected them and am going to correct and return them.

We discussed our goals for the class, what things they would most like to learn. Medical vocab, verb tenses, verb conjugations, conversation and reading and writing skills. Grammar is going to be hard for me, I need to study quite a bit before I can teach it.

Looking forward to this! It is fun work, prepping lesson plans and trying to keep them engaged and learning and focused for 2 hours straight. And I'm earning money too, which is glorious as I was starting to feel very frugal about my money which is disappearing fast here.

Should be a fun experience!

teaching englishhhhh

So a couple of my friends have been teaching english to small classes over at this business school, and I have been wanting to do it as well. Well, last night I was at an irish pub at the monday night trivia game when I got three missed calls in a row from the same number. I went outside, called back, and 3 minutes later I hung up the phone and had signed up to teach english to young adults 8 hours a week! Oh, and starting this afternoon. So I will be teaching Tuesdays and Fridays from 4-8 (ahhh! 4 hours of teaching in a row without a break...!).

The only material I have to work with right now is a book called "The Official Guide to the New TOEFL" (Test of English as a Foreign Language) that resembles the old SAT and AP test prep books I used back in high school. Eek!

So we'll see how it goes this afternoon! I really don't have time to make too much of a game plan, as I also have to finish writing an essay for my anthro of religion class today. Hopefully things will go smoothly enough and not too difficult the first day! I am excited for this opportunity to see what teaching english is like. I think I will learn a ton as well, as speaking english and teaching the ins ans outs of its grammar and such are two very different things, as I am about to find out! Also it will be nice to make some money, as I will earn 8 euros an hour. I am starting to feel pressed for money here as all I do is take out from my accounts all the time, so it will be great to put money into them as well.

Well here we go!

24 days + 5 countries + 2 great friends + cheap flights = Winter Break Traveling through Europe!!!!

So here it is. HUGE, awesome plans for winter break.

My two friends Garren and Alan and I are going to travel together from Dec. 17th to Jan 9th, 24 days, to 5 countries! I created this itinerary by finding the cheapest flights from one place to the next. I started in Malaga, Spain, and chose the cheapest flight and went from there! Here's the final itinerary:

DUBLIN dec 17-22

BRUSSELS (with visits to Bruges and maybe Amsterdam? xmas somewhere) 22-27

VIENNA 27-jan 1 (for new year's! there is a full moon on new year's eve. I LOVE that.)

PARIS 1-5

BERLIN 5-9.

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! how wicked is this!!?

So we got all of our flights for very cheap. The second step is where we are going to stay. We can always find some hostels, but we are trying to save money by couchsurfing as much as we can. We made accounts on CouchSurfing.com and have sent out lots of emails to people in all of these cities. So far we haven't been too successful, but we're still trying. Now that I have an account I get emails every day from people all over the world asking to sleep on my couch! What a crazy world huh?

It is going to be crazy insanely cold!! We have talked to some Germans from Berlin, and when they hear we're going early January, their response is always the same "hhoooooo dang. you are going to die of the cold". Genial! haha.

I am so stoked!!!

Internet and I are finally together again!

Yes. The rumors are true. I HAVE INTERNET in my piso! Finally, after waiting for 6 weeks! No more walking a long way to the internet cafe!

This means that I will most likely be posting more pictures and stories on this blog, since it will be at my fingertips! So be prepared to vicariously live more awesome adventures in Spain! haha this is fun. :)

There are lots of new posts below this one, and I know you haven't read them yet so check them out!

Hey guys, thanks for reading this blog. It makes it so much easier to share stories and pictures with all my family and friends by putting it all on here. And it's fun for me too, to go back and read these and remember! It's a great digital diary. Thanks for sharing it with me!

And remember that I love it when you make comments on my posts! They're fun for me to read. :)

My Life in Granada! Fun activities.

~SALSA CLASS: I am taking this salsa class through UGR Centro de Actividades y Deportes. We meet twice a week, and it's a group of about 25 of us. Everyone else is Spanish, and so it makes me laugh when we're all standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling dance mirror and I see 24 dark heads and then my blond one, haha. Our teacher Nelson is crazy, with long dreads and shiny, sometimes studded, clothing. I am not too hot at salsa yet, but it's really fun, good exercise, and a good way to meet Spaniards!

~GUITAR JAM SESSIONS: It has become a weekly date, Wednesday nights at McVals' piso. Garren, Clare, Alex (from England), McVal, and I all have our guitars and jam together. McVal makes us a good dinner, and then we all sit in a circle, 5 of us and our 5 guitars, and show each other what new songs we've been learning. I am the designated singer, which is fun. Garren and Clare are amazing guitarists (and are actually taking flamenco lessons here from this flamenco master I've seen give a concert here in Granada!), and they can play some beautiful songs together, and I sing with them. It is so much fun to play guitar and sing with people! In the past I've just played alone, and it is way fun to jam together.

~FUTBOL SALA: So I just created a fútbol sala (indoor soccer. I think..) through the UGR recreation department. I actually don't know anything about it at all, and am a little confused. But I am guessing and hoping it's similar to an Intramural college team. I have had my friends sign up, so we have like 7 of us on the roster so far. No schedule or anything yet, but we'll see! Haha so much for being the captain and knowing what the heck is going on. Well it should be fun! Best part: when I was signing up for the team, I had to decide on our team name right then and there, and I wouldn't be able to change it once I decided. Ah! I had no idea! I awkwardly sat there confused until I blurted out "Team California". :) There we go! Go America! hahaha.

~BUDDHIST CENTER: MEDITATION AND CHARLAS: I found this Buddhist center online, and saw they have meditation on Tuesday nights and Buddhist "charlas" (chats/talks) on Thursday nights. This past Tuesday I went to meditation with a friend of mine named Luke who is also interested in Buddhism and meditation. We finally found the center, on the 4th floor of a random apartment building. I hadn't taken the address with me because I was assuming there would be a sign. But, we're here in a big city in Spain, aka businesses and such can be hiden away in apartment buildings and aren't obvious to find. But we found it! It's this cute little center with a nice room for meditation, full of cushions and pillows and pictures of the Dalai Lama and candles and incense. It was a nice, rare haven in this big city. The meditation was led by a man with a calming voice, and it was so fun for it to be in Spanish! I am planning on attending this weekly meditation. I haven't been to the thusday night talk yet but I will check it out next week.

~YOGA: I haven't gone yet, but I have a couple leads on places I can go and I am looking forward to it!

~PING PONG: Alan and I found out we both love ping pong, and have been trying to find a table to play around. I read about this place online where the internationally recogized professional table tennis team Caja Granada team practices and plays, and last night we went to check out the place. We found it, and it's this big place with gorgeous ping pong tables in a long line...never seen anything like it! It was awesome. But we asked, and you have to be a paid member to use their tables. Bummer. So we are still on a search for some table we can play on.

~COOKING: This is my first year without: A) a college dining plan, or B) a mother. Thus, I need to learn how to cook for myself! :) I have started this mission of mine to go over to people's pisos and have them teach me their favorite dish, and then write down the recipe. I am excited to learn, as all I have really been making is sandwiches and pasta for myself. Oh and grilled cheese. (Which my British friends call "Cheese melties"! how cuute!)

~HIKING: I have four day weekends, which means I have quite a bit of free time. I am taking a break on long distance traveling so as to save my money for winter break traveling (AWESOME, AMAZING travel plans for winter break. I have yet to post these plans on the blog. But they are real and incredibly exciting. I am giving it a bit of time to create some suspense...but wait for it and keep checking the blog! haha). So I have free time! I have gone on long, gorgeous hikes the past two weekends and have just loved getting out into the wide countryside. So I have decided I want to go on a long day hike once a week! Either from Granada itself, or take a cheap bus somewhere and explore the area that way. Stoked! I will explore a lot more of Spain this way too :)

Las Alpujarras Pictures

**See the text/story for these pictures a couple of posts BELOW**

Alan and I jumping in our freezing pond

playing music at Angelic's
Hi. I am adorable. Megan is in love with me.
Trevélez, highest altitude city in Spain.
Can you get any more typical Spain!? Jamón (ham) and pueblo blanco...
The group :)

Halloween Pictures

Halloween in Granada!

So they really celebrate Halloween here, it was very impressive! I feel like they actually dress up and celebrate a purer Halloween than we do at home. At home in the US, Halloween has turned into an excuse for college students to dress up, or shall we say dress down, and party. Girls find ways to show as much skin as possible. But here, they actually wear costumes that are scary! Almost everyone had crazy facepaint involving some bloody disguise, gross and way more pure in the scary Halloween spirit than the slutty excuse it's become in the US. You could tell people put a lot of time into their costumes, with detailed face paint, homemade costumes and accesories...good stuff! And a lot of my friends traveled around Europe this weekend, and they all agreed that none of the cities they went to (Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin..) even came close to Granada in terms of Halloween spirit! :)

On Friday night I dressed up with friends and took a bus to a club outside of the city. I had figured out my costume about an hour before, by going into a chino store (kind of like a second hand store I guess...) and finding some sweet snakeskin pants and a hat, so I was Indiana Jones. Garren was a pretty legit pirate, and Alan found a cow hat and proceeded to make his own cow suit that was awesome! Haha. We got on the bus at about 2 am, and it took us to this club about 30 minutes outside of the city, called Embrujo ("Bewtiched"). Perfect. It was so awesome! It was this huge castle! Really, it's hard to explain and unfortunately there are no pictures. Here's a link to the club's site which would be fun to look at:

http://www.embrujocopas.com/Default.aspx

Not sure if that link will work. Anyway, it was this cool castle place, complete with a tall tower, and turrets lining the rooftops, cool Andalucian architecture style buildings... On the way in we walked through this small haunted house which was fairly scary. Alan freaked out when this creepy, bloody costumed man ran after us with a running saw....ok that scared me a bit too. :) The main room was packed with people, and great decorations and thick dry ice smoke for a nice effect.

A couple hours in, Alan and I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, and I ended up leading the way climbing over a metal gate away from all the other people outside. We walked into the darkness, and I found a staircase leading into the dark. We explored all around this pitch black, huge deserted room. There were big tables and chairs and it seemed like a big area for conventions and catering or something...We ended up finding a way onto the roof, and there we stargazed. Gorgeous view of the lights of Granada as well. From the roof, surrounded by turrets in this weird castle place, we watched the bright orange Halloween moon SET at 5:03 am. So awesome! We explored around the roof some more, and walked along these awesome bridges that connected the different rooves. The bridges were about 35 feet up, and they were made of metal grating so you could see through the bridge below your feet. So cool and dangerous! We eventually were found by a zombie (security guard I presume, dressed up :) ), who chased us out of the deserted world we'd found and pushed us back into the crowded and loud dance floor building. So that was a fun place. The whole thing seems like a weird, medieval dream.

Las Alpujarras! hiking in pueblos blancos.

**See pictures for this hiking trip a couple posts ABOVE**

Over the weekend I went hiking in the gorgeous Las Alpujarras mountains with Garren, Alan, two French friends of Garren's, and a Spanish girl.

We took the bus from Granada to Bubión, a 3 hour amazingly beautiful ride. In Bubión we set off hiking on the steep beautiful trails through the mountainside with views of cute pueblos blancos (white towns) settled in the mountains.

We spent the night in Busquistar, in the home of this wonderful French woman named Angelic we met on the trail. She found places to sleep for all 6 of us, and we had a really nice time with her. She works as a shiatsu masseuse, and is a really friendly sweet woman. We ended up playing guitar and piano and singing for hours together that night, in a mix of English and French songs. And her house was adorable, with buddhist decorations and a great view of the mountains from her front door.

The next morning we hiked to our destination, Trevélez, the highest city in all of Spain. On the way there was a snow-fed pond thing, and Alan and I hiked down to it, climbed over the barbed wire fence (with some difficulty) and felt the water. Cold! I convinced Alan he would regret it if he didn't jump in with me, and he decided he'd do it if I did. It was so freezing! As soon as we jumped in we were struggling to climb out, which proved rather difficult as well, as the pond was lined with a slippery rubber covering which made for a fun time of slithering and pulling to haul yourself out. ha! It was so wonderfully refreshing! I thought of you Tyler, we would have been racing to that pond together :)

In total we hiked 32 km, so 19 miles. It was a gorgeous hike, and our group was awesome. We enjoyed our trail meals, napping on rocks in the sun with gorgeous views, and the various dogs and horses we saw along the trail, and the adorable cats in the cute pueblos!